Tori Amos - Midwinter Graces [CD/DVD Combo]
![Midwinter Graces [CD/DVD Combo]](/images/Midwinter-Graces-CD-DVD-Combo-B002QCKOME-L.jpg)
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Tori AmosEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2009-11-10
Music Label: Universal Republic
Soundtracks:
- What Child, Nowell
- Star of Wonder
- A Silent Night with You
- Candle: Coventry Carol
- Holly, Ivy, and Rose
- Harps of Gold
- Snow Angel
- Jeanette, Isabella
- Pink and Glitter
- Emmanuel
- Winter's Carol
- Our New Year
Free Music Notes for Midwinter Graces [CD/DVD Combo]
Free Music Review: A Lone Wild Bird in The Deep Midwinter?
Hit: 5 Stars
With the release of Midwinter Graces (2009), one has to ask: is there anything, musically speaking, that Tori Amos can't do?
Though her recent projects may seem to have stumbled creatively (some fans would say Amos began to go into decline after 1996's Boys For Pele, others, after 2001's Scarlet's Walk), Amos has continued to produce unique, insightful, and exceptional compositions such as 'Playboy Mommy,' 'Cooling,' 'Purple People,' 'Lust,' 'Josephine,' 'Strange,' 'Apollo's Frock,' 'Indian Summer,' 'Marys of the Sea,' 'Original Sinsuality,' 'Garlands,' 'Peeping Tommi,' 'Give,' and 'That Guy,' to name only a handful.
In terms of lighter fare, few songs could be more instantly catchy, likeable, and radio-friendly than the instantaneously driving 'Bouncing Off Clouds,' a loving homage to such mid-1980s post-New Wave hits as Talk Talk's 'Such A Shame' and A-ha's 'Take On Me.'
In many respects, Amos has, as of 2010, created a body of work, which, if far less well known to the general public, creatively compares to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, and Joni Mitchell catalogs. Amos has far outstripped artists like Marianne Faithfull, Rickie Lee Jones, and Kate Bush; Jones and Bush started out strong, but their creativity and compositional talent has been inconsistent at best, while Faithfull's talent appears to lie largely in her interpretive ability.
Midwinter Graces (2009) a remarkable Christmas/Solstice album, follows the buoyant Abnormally Attracted To Sin, released earlier in 2009. While Amos addresses a number of traditional carols, including 'What Child is This?,' 'The Coventry Carol,' 'Emmanuel' and 'We Three Kings' in various but untraditional fashion, the standout tracks are easily those Amos has composed herself. In fact, the deceptively simple 'Snow Angel,' the epic 'A Winter's Carol,' and the highly cinematic 'Our New Year' are among her finest compositions in the last ten years.
Amos has long professed a belief in "fairies," and, despite its title, 'Snow Angel' may be the first song in she actually addresses the experience of encountering these semi-divine beings. With stunningly subtle minimalist lyrics the Imagist poets would have appreciated, Amos has created the most beautiful song depicting "daimonic reality" since Nick Drake's 'River Man' of 1969.
Early Amos-inspiration Kate Bush has admirably tackled the daimonic theme on a number of compositions, but Bush's 'Wuthering Heights,' 'Houdini,' 'Watching You Without Me,' 'Lily,' and 'The Red Shoes,' however enjoyable when taken at face value, are to 'Snow Angel' what the Three Stooges are to the Marx Brothers.
'A Winter's Carol' recalls Bush's epic 'The Ninth Wave' (especially 'Hello Earth') from 1985's The Hounds of Love, but in tightly condensed form. Tackling solid Sir James Frazer and Ronald Hutton territory, Amos leaves Christ behind to tackle the pagan cycle of the seasons; not Jesus, but the Summer Queen and the Holy King are the dramatis personae here, "passing the torch as it was intended," culminating in the rebirth of the light, "a gift of old, wrapped in ribbons of gold for the whole world." Amos's climatic, vision of mankind momentarily brought together in a cosmic embrace is among the most stirring and profound moments in her entire recording career.
Midwinter Graces closes with on a melancholy but dramatic note with 'Our New Year,' which may be intended as the third part of a somber triptych which began with 'Gold Dust' in 2001 and continued with 'Toast' in 2005.
Despite a perplexingly plodding climax, 'Our New Year' may actually be the best of the three; after a poised beginning ("glasses raised, we all say 'cheers'"), the music goes sideways in an extraordinarly winding manner, and the narrator's vision of a lost loved one waving in the distance becomes extremely gripping. In a halting but driving tone, Amos transports the listener to the immediate moment to experience the hope--the expectation--the certainty of recognition--and then the stunning realization of misidentification--"lately I'm sure it's you there, waving in the distance, the closer I get, disappointment, they just have the same color of your hair, and it tears, it tears."
Other standout cuts are an amazing rendition the Coventry Carol called 'Candle--Coventry Carol' and Amos's own big band-era 'Pink and Glitter,' which offers and alternative vision from that of 'A Winter Carol'; here, Amos encourages showering the world in, yes, "pink and glitter."
In many ways a return to form, Midwinter Graces is highly recommended, especially to those who abandoned Amos after the release of Tori-lite 'The Beekeeper' (2005) and especially the maudlinly polemical 'American Doll Posse' (2007).
Midwinter Graces [CD/DVD Combo] Poster
After nearly two decades writing and recording some of her generation's most emotionally powerful music, Tori Amos will release her first seasonal album, Midwinter Graces, on November 10 via Universal Republic Records. A follow up to Tori's critically acclaimed studio album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin, Midwinter Graces will find Tori reworking and expanding on classic carols as well as developing some of her very own seasonal tracks. Midwinter Graces is an album that has been in the making for the past 40 years. Raised in the Baltimore area under the watchful eye of her Methodist minister father, Tori grew up playing holiday carols at Sunday services and Christmas Day celebrations in her father's church. These were the songs that gave a young Tori her first taste of music, and now almost 40 years later Tori gets her own chance to reimagine classics like "What Child, Nowell" and "Star of Wonder." Tori will also add her own bittersweet bliss to the season with original tracks like "Pink and Glitter" and "Our New Year."Miscellaneous Music CDs
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